In Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’, he argued that the novel and the newspaper were the key mediums of the imagined community. However, in our increasingly connected and globalised world, the internet provides us with a shared digital culture that allows us to communicate with one another across the globe. In the latest LSE International History blog, Trinity College Dublin PhD candidate Joel Herman discusses Anderson’s model in relation to COVID-19 – can it be reimagined to explore the creation of a global community in the present?
Since its original publication nearly forty years ago, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism has become canon and not just in the author’s primary field of sociology.[1] Numerous historical studies have cited Anderson’s work and adopted aspects of his theorised ‘Imagined Community’, perhaps most prolifically his delineation of ‘print capitalism’ as an origin of national consciousness. A formulation which has been used as an interpretive tool in accounts of the transformation of the Late Early Modern public sphere. These studies have utilized Anderson’s theoretical framework as an addition to, modification on, or revision of earlier Habermasian conceptions of an idealist bourgeois ‘structural transformation’ of the public sphere.[2]
Anderson’s elucidation of the power of print capitalism to awaken national imaginings comes in the second chapter of Imagined Communities.[3] Here, in a wider sociological explanation of the historical processes which would first allow individuals to imagine the nation, he illuminates the internal features of his theoretical model. In summary the ‘imagined community’ is formed through its participation in a shared print culture, especially the novel, but perhaps most powerfully through the newspaper. In reading these common texts simultaneously, and at regular intervals, individuals could begin to imagine themselves collectively as part and participant in local, regional, and eventually national communities united through a common culture. A common culture that would help shape and form distinct national identities.
This process would contribute to the rise of revolutionary movements in Ireland and America. Movements that shared a similar source but would net very different results. A close reading of Irish, Early American, and British newspapers in the eighteenth century allows one to trace an important strand of this development. As distinct print cultures and corresponding reading publics would evolve out of the imperial public sphere in urban centres in Ireland and the American Colonies. In this way provincial print cultures would move beyond the mere copies of imperial discourse they had once been, by the middle of the eighteenth century, and become a vehicle by which settler populations could imagine and bring new communities into being. Although the prerequisites for participation were often narrowly defined to exclude the gendered, ethnic, and religious ‘other’.
